Emma Donoghue, author of Room, is haunted by history (Picture: supplied)

‘I’ve never touched a frog, I’m so squeamish,’ bestselling novelist Emma Donoghue tells me as we sit in a Georgian hotel in central London. ‘But it was such a gift to me that it was the thing Jenny [a 19th-century frog-catcher] was hunting, as they are a wonderful symbol – they’re playful and versatile but terribly fragile as a species because of that moist skin that picks up every toxin.’

Frog Music, Donoghue’s 12th book of fiction, transports readers to San Francisco, 1876, and revolves around the true-life crime of Jenny Bonnet’s mysterious murder and the slippery lives of her acquaintances: French burlesque dancer Blanche, her lover, Arthur, and his companion, Ernest. Donoghue explores not only the fragile skin of frogs but the thin skin of these humans, by turns sensitive and toughening up.

Music is the other haunting motif in an evocative novel interwoven with lyrics from old folk songs, showing how music can leapfrog the boundaries of time and place.

‘I find a lot of those words – especially in the oral tradition – so powerful as they’ve had to last,’ says Donoghue. ‘I absolutely love folk songs, from sad ballads to bawdy songs.’

Donoghue found huge acclaim with her 2010 Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Room, which has sold more than a million copies and was partly inspired by the Fritzl family’s escape. Told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack, who is held captive by his mother, the clever concept of the locked room becomes a metaphor for the parent-child bond.

Frog Music returns to the historical fiction Donoghue has long written but it has similar themes to Room.

‘Ever since our kids were born – they’re ten and six now – I’ve been fascinated by parenting as a subject,’ she says. ‘After writing Room, in which the mother is so good and heroic, it was so pleasurable to write a truly bad mother with Blanche. I wanted to make it difficult for love to bloom here.’

The question at the novel’s heart is: at what point would you abandon – and reclaim – your child?

History comes alive under Donoghue’s imaginative pen. ‘I absolutely love the way historical facts are tiny bits of grit that turn into a pearl – I find them so helpful for making the story go off in odd directions,’ she says.

Donoghue’s first historical novel was Slammerkin (2000), although the popularity of so-called ‘historical fiction’ has rocketed in recent years. ‘I remember my agent groaning and saying this is going to be so hard to sell but nowadays it seems readers are so unafraid of it,’ she says.

In a lively conversation peppered with laughter and erudite references, Donoghue discusses stylistic technique. ‘You want your point-of-view character to know their world but never give the impression of being a tour guide,’ she says. As such, we intimately come to know San Francisco during the ‘transitional time’ of 1876. ‘It had a reputation for freedom yet they were locking women up for wearing trousers,’ says Donoghue, who also elucidates the city’s racial tensions.

Donoghue powerfully portrays people on society’s peripheries. ‘It began with feminism but broadened from there,’ she says. ‘Once you start to look at history in a revisionist way, you think: who haven’t I heard from?’

Her own history has been filled with books and home is a recurrent theme. ‘I spent my entire childhood reading. I read every fairytale collection in our library.’ She gained a PhD from Cambridge and, at 23, sold her first novel, Stir-Fry.

‘Because I’ve emigrated twice, home always gets questioned in my work,’ she says. ‘I’m very nostalgic for where I grew up in Dublin but I also spent eight years in Cambridge, now I live in Canada. It’s been helpful to emigrate twice. What my journey has given me is a real interest in people of different countries and different times.

‘I don’t think there’s any reason for writers to stay in their time and place – or even genre. I still work regularly in theatre and I’ve been writing the film script for Room.’

Fiction, she muses, is the freest form as ‘you can follow your own obsessions’, yet there’s no saying where this ambitious and inventive author might venture next. As she puts it: ‘As long as I’m prepared to put the work in, there’s really no limit to where I can go.’